


Proust's Law Of Definite Proportions

by spiritofneglect



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Cas is an angel and well they live longer, Cas outlives the boys, Castiel (Supernatural)-centric, Castiel Loves Dean Winchester, Castiel alone, Dead Dean Winchester, Dead Sam Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Castiel (Supernatural), I had a spn crisis, I'm Sorry, Life for Cas after the boys, M/M, Post Ending, Post-Canon, Promise, References to Depression, Sad Castiel (Supernatural), The title will make sense later, this is all I could do
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 07:37:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18633724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritofneglect/pseuds/spiritofneglect
Summary: It has been eleven years. Eleven years since he first walked in through the old doors of a barn, the hinges screaming in protest, lights bursting and exploding in shattered glass and shattered sparks that danced through the air, across his shoulders to tumble along his sides and scatter like stardust around his feet.It has been eleven years when he stops counting in 2020.





	1. Fire

**Author's Note:**

> honestly, I just had a crisis one night and started writing.  
> I base this after season 15, which at the time I write this hasn't even started airing. 
> 
> I just wanted to explore the pain of Cas outliving the boys in the end, and just how long he lives, and the consequences of it all.

It isn’t raining, it’s dry, dry and cold but it isn’t raining. The bitter bite of the wind is merciless, stinging all the more with the lack of rain to blame for the wetness of his cheeks. He can feel where tears have broken off, veined down his face like broken porcelain. 

Castiel has always been indifferent to human years, to counting them off and numbering them, to keeping track. Because he is an angel and he has never had the need, has never felt that counting would do him much good, in the grand scheme of things. 

Then he met the Winchesters, and he started counting; at first, the numbers seemed to ascend slowly, but with every year, it seemed to past faster. And in the end it felt like no time at all.

It has been eleven years. Eleven years since he first walked in through the old doors of a barn, the hinges screaming in protest, lights bursting and exploding in shattered glass and shattered sparks that danced through the air, across his shoulders to tumble along his sides and scatter like stardust around his feet. 

Eleven years feels like nothing at all, like he’d blinked and suddenly it had passed. And yet.  
He feels these eleven years aged him more than his millennia of serving heaven ever had. The pain and loss, the heart break and stinging confusion of free will, of following the brothers, the sheer bone deep ache of love and joy. 

Heaven couldn’t teach him this, watching the earth and the evolution and the arcs of humanity, the tragedies he took part in. It couldn’t teach him what the Winchesters had carved into his being, loyalty and family, love and trust. 

He has been pliable in their hands, they have helped mould him into who he is, the ideals he holds; all learnt from the brother’s and their earth shattering devotion for the other. This is what family is, what it means, they seemed to wordlessly say, this is what you do for family. This is how you love. 

And god, does Castiel love for them. 

And so, Castiel had counted for them, for himself. To know how long the Winchesters had been with him; because one day the number might mean something dear, might mean something more than any number ever has. 

And like most things splutter and choke, dying at his feet, before his eyes, with iron and rust, dirt and blood; so does his counting. It’s 2020, and the most precious blood Castiel has ever witnessed, runs red and stains his skin, seeps in and curses the number in the back of his mind never to grow again. 

Castiel might not believe in destiny any more, but there is one fate that he knows all share, that every path does lead to. And he supposes, if he were to believe in destiny, than this would be the only event he could pin to it. 

He doesn’t wait, can’t draw out the inevitable. 

It takes him long, labouring hours to mount the large bonfire, exploring the forest for the wood, biting the inside of his cheek to distract from the thought how much faster this had been in the past when there were others to lend their hands. 

He passes the time numbly, lets thorns bite and nip into his fingers, blood to bead at nicks and pricks, anything that could burn he adds and builds on the skeleton of a funeral service yet to happen. 

It is bordering on evening when he finishes, has all but cleared out the surrounding forest floor, and he is left with a bonfire big enough for the best of hunter’s funerals.

His mouth goes dry at the thought. He licks his lips to try and bring moisture back, but his tongue is thick and heavy, rough as sandpaper and brings no relief. 

Almost without thought, muscle working on memory, he goes to continue to the next stage of a hunter’s funeral, but glimpsing the white sheet, he finds his legs unable to move. His body unwilling to get closer. 

Touching it, lifting what was mostly hidden by the body of the Impala, would only be an admission to the reality of what he is about to do.

It’s not real if you can’t touch it, he thinks feebly, and the idea tastes disgustingly like denial on his tongue.

So instead he paces. Paces until the light is bordering slipping past the horizon, shadows cast long and wide, world growing greyer and darker with every moment. Until the very last possible minute he stalks laps, pointedly ignoring the impala, what lay beside it.

He walks and when he isn’t he sits, but sitting is less of a thing and he finds his thoughts wondering and when they wondered he finds his chest constricting, eyes burning and breathing stumbling like a fawn freshly walking.  
His own knees feel just as weak. 

But despite the shake and feeling of inevitable collapse, Castiel hoists the first, taller and slightly heavier, bundle of cloth into his arms with relative ease.  
He struggles more with the second bundle of cloth, but it is not the weight that has his body quaking and bottom lip as wobbly as his knees. He has felt his weight in his arms before, this shape and build, many, many times.  
But this time is different, it had been warm then, chest rising and falling, skin imperfect and usually broken, a dusting of freckles scattered like the stars on a clear summer night sky.  
Now it is cold and devoid of movement, bleach white and cotton.  
Castiel thinks he might choke on his own tongue if he tries to swallow past the building pressure in his throat, so instead he just forces it down with an ease that has come with much practice.  
His vision blurring and swimming as he blinks hard and fast, taking gulping breaths to settle himself, he takes the final steps back from the cold pile of woods and bundled sheets.

God, he laments, they are so much more than just cold, bundled sheets and tape. 

He reminds himself to properly breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth.  
And he does so, exhaling in puffs of swirling hot clouds from between chapped and busted lips. 

He blames the biting cold of the evening for the trembling in his hands as he reaches for the torch, holds it in a white knuckle grip.  
He wonders, lamely, if the wood might give and burst, if the shock of it would have Dean appearing behind him with reprimand hot on his tongue. 

But he doesn’t try, and the wood doesn’t even splinter.  
It would just be a waste to break, because he knows where Dean is, knows he won’t throw the sheets off his body to tell Castiel to stop wasting time. 

He focuses on the torch, on lighting it, to ease the tremble, because the warmth of the flame should chase away the cold that has only his hands shivering.  
The flame flickers and takes, and Castiel watches them dance as he lifts the torch in front of him, holds it out, watches how it sets the ground aglow. 

He shuffles toward the unlit bonfire, each dragging footstep harder than the last until he stands before it, somehow feeling even colder than before; the tremor in his hands having climbed up to his now shaking shoulders.  
His breathing has grown ragged with his heaving chest, and he forgets to breath correctly, because he’s exhaling from his nose and it sounds like a man suffocating. 

He looks up, catches sight of the white cotton sheets and he immediately snatches his gaze to the side.  
He catalogues everything around him, the whisper of smoke from the torch, the way the light spills and shifts unpredictably on the ground in tune with the breeze. He notices the way the tree tops claw into the sky, obscure the other otherwise clear night like talons trying to rip into the belly of a sleeping doe.

But there’s no hiding in his mindless, useless listing of his surroundings, and the reality of where he is, whom he is about to burn, is looming before him. There’s no hiding, and there was never going to be any running from it either. He has to face the simple reality set before him, has to simply face it head on. 

Like a man about to hang, Castiel squeezes his eyes shut, taking a long, shuddering breath before finally, slowly, he faces what has always been awaiting him.  
Sam and Dean, hidden away beneath white cloth, resting as though merely sleeping. But they can’t be asleep, because they lay atop a bonfire of gathered wood, they can’t be sleeping because they were always going to end up here. 

And, Castiel contemplates, perhaps he was always going to be the one holding the torch. 

This is the final resting place, the final moment they’ll be tangible and untouched by dark forces. For what burns doesn’t return. Will never return, no matter what Castiel does.  
But, he thinks, he wouldn’t do anything anyway. Because there is nothing left for them to do, for there is peace now that they are done.

He’ll burn them, because first and foremost, they are hunters, and secondly, because if what burns doesn’t return, then he knows deep in his heart they’ll remain at rest, at peace.  
Somewhere he won’t ever be able to reach, could never even bring himself too. 

He is probably a reminder of their time here, what they’ve had to do and the pain they’ve lived.  
In heaven, he thinks, they must be somewhere happy, with their family, together. He could only serve as a reminder of pain, loss and sorrow. 

And so he exhales, lets his breath whistle past his bottom lip as his chest aches dully.  
“Goodbye, Sam,” he lowers the torch slowly, pauses for a final, singular moment, lets it wash over him, the scent of smoke and forest and death. “Dean.”  
He throws the torch, and where it settles on the wood it begins to climb. 

The blaze is a beacon in the endless dark, aglow and burning, the heat dragging across his skin as it roars. He stares, watches the flame dance and flicker out as they seem to reach for the heavens, getting every higher as it engulfs and ebbs with life; seemingly pulsating with it. 

The night passes hot and bright, the heat seemingly lifting the tears from his face as they fall. Castiel stands in silent, solitary vigilance.  
A hunter’s funeral, likely the last one Castiel shall ever attend. 

He doesn’t like the way the thought makes his insides constrict. 

The cold to his back is biting but the heat to his front is staggering and deadly. And that’s where Castiel finds himself; trapped between two extremes, watching Sam and Dean ascending to the stars, carried on the live flames that flicker out at the very top, higher and higher. 

Castiel lifts an arm, empty hand splayed, wonders if he can grasp the fire, every lick of it; but they’re too high, too far, and with his broken wings, Castiel will never be able to reach so high.


	2. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He learns his first lesson when he tries to return home; to the bunker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first two chapters have obviously been fairly short, but they'll probably start to grow in length as I reach the meat of this story.   
> Promise to eventually add some dialogue, even tho this is Cas centric, promise to wiggle some in there!   
> (I'm not the most dialogue heavy person with this sort of work soz lol)

He learns his first lesson when he tries to return home; to the bunker. 

The halls echo when he walks, the food in the kitchen goes bad and the beer sits, unopened in fridges Castiel eventually empties and turns off at the wall. He has no use for them.  
He discovers that without company the beer is stale and watery, and so he pours it all down the sink.   
He keeps an empty bottle, keeps lots of empty bottles, tells himself that maybe they’ll be of use one day, maybe he can save something in them.   
Any excuse to line them on a shelf in his room, no one else will have to know they’re there anyways.   
The kitchen grows cold and vacant, the air stale and bitter over the time spent on hunts that Castiel embarks on, if just to keep himself busy. Eventually he munches through all the lucky charm cereal that Jack had enjoyed, that Sam had hated, and he doesn’t buy a new box.   
With the cereal gone, the kitchen becomes stagnant and empty, seeing no reason to enter, Castiel never does. 

And the dust begins to settle.

Over time the bunker slowly tidies, Cas puts books away and whenever he returns they’re never moved, there’s no mugs out by opened piles of books for lore, the lamps are never accidently left switched on.

It is void of any signs of human life, as it has been since the Winchesters had last left through the front doors. 

He has no use for the lockers, forgets what day he had switched them off, and never back on again.   
He has no bins to empty, no books to put away, no kitchen to tidy; and Cas finds that he begins to return to the bunker out of novelty, because he has nowhere else to go.   
But the warmth that use to be in the walls turns cold, the echoes of his foot falls become an unwelcome disturbance in the otherwise unbroken spell of silence that has settled in the very bones of the walls, accented by the soft hum of power in the war room.

Castiel can’t tell if it’s the volume of the hum increasing, or the deepening silence that makes it seem so. 

But he begins to avoid it all together. 

 

Castiel steps through the bunker’s door, turns to shut it behind him and he stands stationary and staring at the peeling paint, listening to the electrical hum of the war room below long after the click of the lock falling into place. 

He isn’t sure what it is that makes him snap, that finally has the brewing anger buried deep within spilling and boiling over. Thinks maybe it’s the hum, or the stillness of the otherwise aching silence.   
He strides down the stairs, the metal shuddering beneath heavy feet, teeth grinding and breath tearing ragged through his nose, heat climbing up his neck heavy and dangerous.

He stalks through the bunker like a hungry predator, tearing through the rooms to turn off every light, lock every door that can be locked, erasing all evidence that the bunker had once been occupied by himself and those before. 

Castiel leaves a cold, barren darkness in his wake, anger seeming to leech off him in tendrils that fold and hide in the shadows. 

How could this have happened, he thinks, to hate this place deep in his marrow. Like it’s rejecting him with its silence, with its uninhabited and cold walls, a mockery of what it used to be. It’s chilly and the air is stale, soured with time like milk left out. 

Castiel feels like he walks through a graveyard, and he tries to ignore the swing of red hot anger and the sorrow burning through his veins at the thought. Because maybe it is, maybe this is the graveyard of what he once had. 

He storms past every room that once had meant something deep and profound, and he finds his blood boiling at the sight, his eyes burning with what he hopes to be nothing but disdain. 

And so, for the first time since he parked her at dawn in his solitary return, Castiel stands in front of the Impala, baby Dean had so affectionately referred to her as, and stares at her glossy black finish, his anger dissipating into a bone deep ache of despondency.

She was as much as Winchester as the brothers, something Castiel was (is) not, and part of him feels the need to somehow communicate this to her.  
Sorry, he tries to communicate through the brush of his fingertips across the bonnet, but I am not them. Never will be. 

He doesn’t say a word, wouldn’t and doesn’t know what to say that could possibly encompass the magnitude of the passing moments, of the emotions swelling and growing like an incoming tide. 

Baby is silent in return, engine and subsequently bonnet startling cold to the touch.   
Cas leans through her open driver’s side window, pulls the keys free from where he had left them in the ignition, for a drive he had at the time planned and had never had the resolve to finally commit to.   
He wasn’t a Winchester after all, and he never had been. 

The keys settle like a weight in his pocket. 

He takes a final, precautionary stroll through the bunker, finds that all the books are neatly away as they have been since he put them there, that the war room still hums irritatingly loud, his footfalls still echo and reverberate through the halls, the dungeons are packed away and clean, empty and dark, a sense of discomfort he had never felt before lingering whenever his back was to empty spaces.   
In his calmness Castiel realises he has missed nothing, doors are latched and locked, nothing remains out of place, nothing to hint at the life that had once made the bunker what he yearns it to be now. Home.

He checks his room, finds himself passing time lamely, names each empty bottle he has lined up, can recall them off by heart now. He brushes imaginary wrinkles from his bed, smooths over the pillow, looks around, lets the small amount of details burn into his memory.   
He slips his phone from his pocket, battery drained and useless, places it neatly on the desk top, then he’s shutting the door behind him with a soft, final click. 

He ends up outside Dean’s room, the Impala’s keys heavy in his pocket. It takes him a moment to collect himself before he gathers the resolve to push through the door. 

The room is undisturbed from when Dean last left it, Cas hadn’t even opened the door before now. And he almost stumbles at just how touched this room is by Dean’s past presence. 

The way the bed is made, the pull of the sheets and the flick of the quilt, littered with small imperfections that Cas had smoothed from his own. The desk, the photos, the jacket hanging on the back of a chair.   
He takes a deep, wobbly breath though his nose, feels his whole body move with it, shoulders rise and fall, chest seeming to pull in every ounce of air it can before he’s exhaling heavily, eyes skittering around the room.   
It’s suddenly stifling, and all too much, and so not wasting a moment more; Castiel pulls the keys from his trench coat, places them gently in the pocket of the jacket on the back of the seat, careful not to disturb it.   
He hears them jingle when he lets go, one last time, and like a bell chiming, it’s his cue to leave. 

He takes one last sweeping glance from the bunker door, flicks the master switch, waits for the lights to shut off, one by one, for the last remnant echo of the humming of the power to fade; before he steps through the door, pulling it shut and locking it behind him. 

The bunker had grown cold, quiet, had only amplified the fact that they were gone and Cas was well and truly alone now. And it’s then, that Cas really understands that it is not a place that one calls home; but the people that occupy it.


End file.
